Introduction

The Dead Sea Scrolls Institute provides important additional resources and scholarly support to the University's Graduate Program in Biblical Studies. The Institute sponsors regular symposia, in which leading scholars from around the world are invited to give lectures to students and to the public on the latest advances in scroll research.

John Collins of the Yale University Divinity School offered the inaugural address at the fall 1995 symposium. Martin Hengel of Tübingen University headed up an all-star roster of speakers at a special international symposium held in April 1999. Other speakers have included George J. Brooke, Daniel Falk, Timothy Lim, James Sanders, Eileen Schuller, Emanuel Tov, Eugene Ulrich, and James VanderKam.

The papers read at the Institute's symposia are edited by the directors Martin Abegg and Peter Flint and are published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. as Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature. The first volume of this series, Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. by C. A. Evans and P. W. Flint), appeared in 1997. Five more volumes have followed with two currently "in the press."

The Canada Research Chairs Program has appointed Peter Flint, PhD as a Research Chair in Dead Sea Scrolls Studies. TWU joins UBC and McMaster in representing Canada's three chairs in the area of Religious Studies but is Canada's only tier one appointment. Most recently, Martin G. Abegg, Jr.,PhD, has been appointed to the Ben Zion Wacholder Professorship in Dead Sea Scrolls Studies. These latest appointments duly recognize more than 10 years of accomplishments by the faculty of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University and support ambitious ongoing and future research.